Sounds of Silence
by The Black Sluggard
Summary: Sometimes it was hard for Sylar to believe he had escaped. Oneshot.


_What if I wake up and it's all gone? What if I'm alone again?_

He knew it was irrational. He _knew _that, but knowing never seemed to help. Every night, when he lay down to sleep, the same thought passed through Sylar's head.

It was as if some damaged, masochistic part of his mind refused to believe he had truly escaped from the hell he'd lived in in his head: the lifeless city with its emptiness and its _silence_. It was a part that liked to remind him of how, time and again, it had been proven to him how fragile his grip on reality really was. A part which taunted that, if his mind could be fooled into believing he was someone else, if it could be fooled into believing he was somewhere else entirely, then he could just as easily fool himself. After all, that been his first thought that day he'd followed the sounds of clanging metal and shouting. Impossible sounds in that dead place he had inhabited. And even when he'd found Peter, he'd refused at first to believe he was real.

That same, doubting part refused to trust that any of _this_ was real—that the fight at the Carnival had happened, or that the world now teemed with life all around him. And even as he lay at night, windows opened wide on even the coldest nights to admit the comforting sounds of traffic, that part whispered the word _illusion_ in his ears. It whispered the word _lie_.

And all too often those whispers managed to drown out all other sound so that those thoughts took over his dreams. Many of those dreams were simply repeats of the nightmare Parkman had trapped him in, but some were far more creative. One of the worst had left him wandering the streets that were apparently deserted, save for the fiendish knowledge, of the type that often came in dreams, that the people were all _there_. He just couldn't see them, and they couldn't see _him_, and he was helpless to try and reach them...

Somehow, that had been worse than being alone.

When he woke in the morning from dreams like that, it felt like he could never dress himself fast enough—as if he raced against some nameless force to reach the street in time, before it could all be taken away.

The staff at the cafe down the street had long since gotten used to him arriving very early, looking disheveled and a little bit desperate. Most of the time he just sat in the corner with his coffee and whatever was good that day and watched the other customers file in and out in their endless dance. It was soothing, losing himself in the chaotic hum of humanity, breathing it like air. If he had nothing else pressing—and save the occasional lunch with Peter, he very rarely did—this was often what he did with most of his day.

Sometimes, when he was dying for more interaction, he would leave and come back as a different customer, and he savored the wide variety of flavors it afforded him. He had flirted with the pretty blonde barista, both as a man and a woman, and gleaned enough evidence he was sure she preferred the latter. He'd argued both sides of numerous political issues with a college student who often visited in the mornings, and discovered a shy young man who became shockingly articulate when he had someone to debate with.

In one persona, a few conversations with the shop's owner had earned her pity. She thought he was a war vet, returned with some trauma. While the scars she saw hadn't been gotten the way she believed, they were still very real, and he'd played along with the assumption for her company. She never seemed to mind it when he struck up some bizarre conversation.

Yet it didn't seem to matter what he did, where he spent his time, or who he met. When he went home at the end of the day it was always alone, and the doubts would begin to return. And Sylar knew his fears were irrational, that the world around him was real, and it wasn't going anywhere...

But still there was a part of him that had never escaped that empty city, and he was starting to think it never would.


End file.
